I'm older now, and simple beer pleasures are the most meaningful to me. They tend to be encountered locally. It is my aim to get unplugged and explore some of them, slowly and thoughtfully. I'd tell you where it's leading, except that I've no idea ... and that's the whole point of the journey: To find out.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

We make our beers and then they make us.

There's something about this article that pertains to Rate Advocate, but I can't put my finger on it.

Wait -- that's not accurate. It's that I don't care. Then again, I've been drinking beer.

Social media’s struggles sum up a modern malaise: the inability to recognise value beyond market-driven metrics

... Twitter’s problem is the same as everyone else’s, in that worth, value, status in its realm are measured in numbers, specifically numbers of followers. In order to get followers, users can a) be celebrities or b) be super-entertaining. Or, given the inconvenience of those paths to popularity, two more common routes are c) seeking out and following people who will automatically follow you back and unfailingly following all who follow you and d) buying software that accomplishes the same thing in seconds.

So you’re being followed by 2,000 or 20,000 people – now what? Experience teaches me that genuinely tending to the tweets of more than 200 people becomes impractical (and unenjoyable) unless you treat it as part of your profession. What this implies is a law of diminishing returns, with everyone sending out tweets few people have the time or energy to read or act upon. Essentially, Twitter, like the economy it is part of, is eating itself: it has become a social pyramid scheme whose enormous strengths are undermined by its own – our own – market-derived metrics, which tell us nothing about the quality of the experience. Indeed, in what terms do we value Twitter as an entity? Number of users. Stock price. The spiralling presence of marketers on Twitter is a symptom, not a cause, of its problems: an expression of the flawed global logic at its heart ...